Not your aesthetic

Content warning: discussions of disordered eating, and mentions of various mental health disorders

If you stumble around on Tumblr, Twitter, or TikTok for long enough, you’ll see it: black-and-white pictures of razor blades overlaid with sad quotes, girls with dark mascara bleeding down their cheeks, Lana Del Rey lyrics pasted atop images of an overcast sky, and a measuring tape wrapped around a thin waist, all liked, reblogged, and reposted hundreds of times. Poetic sadness, beautiful tragedy, a caricature of suffering. Social media has created a romanticised aesthetic of mental illness—and it is not only inaccurate, but harmful. 

Scrolling through the images on these platforms, watching To the Bone or Thirteen Reasons Why, a clear image of the ill individual takes shape. A white girl in her teens or early twenties; pale skin with artfully smudged black eyeliner; thin from self-denial or simple disinterest, as food is much less important than her poetic contemplations; faint scars from a mysterious past, half-hidden beneath long sleeves; face adorned with a tragic smile or delicate tears; and beautiful in a haunting way that happy girls aren’t. The shadows beneath her red-rimmed eyes are dark enough to make her look a little tired—she listened to Mitski and penned evocative verses instead of sleeping—but never so much as to detract from her heart-rending charm. Anxiety complements her quirky personality and leads her to linger in corners at parties, an unconventional and fascinating magnet that always draws an admiring crowd. Depression manifests itself in the girl’s fondness for black clothing and occasional crying spells, marked by silent tears that her ever-patient boyfriend brushes off her cheeks. Her restrictive eating habits don’t irritate or shock her friends—who would never leave her, of course—but still keep her wrists delicate and collarbones visible. Whether it’s the infamous “thinspo” images on Tumblr, the “edtwt” community on Twitter, the “depression quotes” circulating on Instagram, or the “sad girl aesthetic” that has reentered the popular imagination since the pandemic, representations of mental illness in the media reinforce this misleading image. 

I’ll admit it—I admire that girl. In fact, I envy her. She looks effortlessly pretty during panic attacks, and I’d like to know what brand of mascara she uses that runs in such a flattering way. My experiences with mental illness have been much different and far less attractive. My depression is less camera-friendly crying and more so sudden, messy storms of inconsolable sobbing that nobody wants—or even knows how—to comfort me through; less catchy poetry and more hours spent trapped in bed like a pathetically dead insect pinned to styrofoam. Anxiety is less cute nervousness and more embarrassing hyperventilation, lungs suffocating themselves, and being sick in the dirty bathroom of a train station. Anorexia is less so a discreet denial of food out of  admirable self-control and more so screaming matches with my parents over the birthdays and Christmases I’ve ruined. It’s less casual forgetfulness of meals and more obsessive researching of “calories in five unsalted almonds.” It means more threats of hospitalisation, forced walks through bone-chilling snowstorms, secret exercises in the middle of the night, and handfuls of hair falling through my fingers from malnutrition. Mental illness is not cute, romantic, or desirable—it’s the classes I’ve dropped and the jobs I’ve been forced to quit, the endless rotation of pills that never seem to work, the ugly lines of discoloured skin that draw scrutinising stares and prying questions. It’s being uncertain about whether I’ll see another year. It’s hoping I don’t. It’s the police my doctor called, while banging on the door to see if I’m dead. Nothing is beautiful when it steals half of your life and curses the rest. And unlike the girl in the films, I lose nearly all the friends I make: if they don’t walk away in exasperation or alarm, I push them out myself to avoid the inevitable collapse. And nobody can brush the tears off my cheeks if I can’t maintain a stable relationship for more than a month. I’m sorry, I can’t go to parties or restaurants—I have a clinical meal plan to follow, and I forget how to breathe in the presence of strangers. People never think that’s cute. So no, mental illness has not made me attractive: it has made me disagreeable and insane, unfit for relationships, and a burden on an expectant society. 

And what about everything else? While “mental illness” in the media has become synonymous with rose-tinted depictions of the romantic trifecta of depression, anxiety, and anorexia, other conditions are hardly mentioned, if at all. Personality disorders, schizophrenia, psychosis, bipolar disorder, bulimia, OCD, and countless others are shown only through stigmatising caricatures or surrounded by fearful silence, deemed unpalatable for general consumption and too difficult to glamourise. 

Even within its limited repertoire, the media utterly fails to reflect the diversity of mental illness victims. Ethnic minorities and LGBTQ+ individuals have been shown to be similarly or more vulnerable to poor mental health than their white, heterosexual, or cisgender counterparts, and yet they are conspicuously absent from Tumblr’s aesthetic images. Despite what these flawed portrayals suggest, mental illness is not picky—it does not limit its claws to young, straight, cisgender white women. 

This selective romanticisation of mental illness is not representation, and it does more harm than good. It encourages the glamorisation and even fetishisation of a false notion of suffering, and it trivialises the diverse and immense challenges faced by those who live with psychiatric disorders, reducing their pain to an aesthetic. It discourages us from speaking out about our experiences, for fear of being dismissed if we fit into the superficial mould of mental illness shaped by the media, or shamed, rejected, and ostracised if we don’t. When we fail to meet the narrow criteria of a Pinterest aesthetic, we are unceremoniously pushed from its uncomfortable pedestal. No longer the objects of misdirected admiration or desire, we are left to rot with the rest of our capitalist society’s liabilities. We struggle to pull ourselves through the insatiable demands of a neurotypical world. 

In sum, mental illness is not an aesthetic. It is not beautiful or romantic. It is not an endearing quirk, a personality trait, or a cute accessory. It is a disability. It is a set of life-ruining diseases that can destabilise and destroy the daily experiences of those who suffer from them. It can require constant care and years of intensive treatment—on top of a privileged financial position—to ameliorate. Too often it is fatal. We need to reframe how the media depicts and discusses mental illnesses. We need less romanticisation and more genuine, diverse representation, including  more conversations that elevate the voices of people living with psychiatric disorders. We need to be allowed to share our real experiences without being invalidated, stigmatised, or shamed. If this world is ever going to become a place where we feel seen and welcome, all of us need to accept that mental illness is not pretty—and that’s okay.

Editor’s Note: The piece has been edited to fix a grammatical error.